It’s the holiday weekend, and I don’t feel like posting any heavy stuff here now.  I’m busy with a bunch of home repair and improvement chores this weekend, and I just want to take a break from the world for now.  I’ve got the deck to reseal, my iron handrails by the front steps and porch to clean and paint, and a bunch of pots to put flowers in.  I don’t want to even look at the news for now.  So I’m going to share a little family trick with the rest of you kids.  How to make a jug of perfectly smooth and tasty sweet ice tea.  I’ve no idea why so many people get it wrong, but most of the stuff I taste, particularly around here in Maryland, is too rough on the pallet.  They like to make this "sun tea" for some reason, and it never tastes right to me. 

Making ice tea right is really very simple. They seem to have the knack for it in the South, but I didn’t know that until I visited down there recently.  Apparently sweet ice tea is a southern thing.  I’ve no idea how my mom, a Pennsylvania Yankee, got the method figured out.  I think it was just trial and error.  But by the time I was 12 she had it down pat and when I was a kid I just loved summertime because it was ice tea time.  Now I make it all the time.  I generally have a tall glass of it somewhere nearby all day long.

I start by boiling a kettle of water.  Filtered usually.  There are two tricks to it.  The first is to figure out how much sweetener you need for a given amount of boiling water beforehand.  It isn’t sweetened to taste afterward, but before.  I make about a kettle full, which works out to, I reckon, about a quart and a half, or about 48 ounces of water.  So I know from experience that it takes about a quarter cup of sweetener.  Your mileage may vary.  I used to use pure sugar, which I bought by the 25 pound bag at Costco.  But since I started watching my weight I’ve been using Splenda.  It works just fine for me as a sugar substitute.

I put the sweetener in the empty jug first.  When the water comes to a boil I pour it in over the sweetener, and it goes instantly into solution.  Then I put in the tea bags.  I just use plain old Lipton orange pekoe and pekoe tea bags.  Three standard size bags work for me for this amount of water.  Again, your mileage may vary.  I’ll place the top on the jug loosely and walk away from it.

See, the second trick, and probably the most important, is to let the tea cool down at its own speed.  Never, Never put it into the fridge before it’s at room temperature.  It’ll go bitter when you do that, even if it’s just a little bit warm to the touch.  Just let the jug cool off on its own to room temperature with the bags in it.   It may take hours.  That’s fine.  I usually do a jug before bed and just leave it overnight.  Once it’s at room temperature, then take the bags out, put the jug in the fridge and let it cool down.

That’s it.  Nothing really special about it.  But do it that way and you’ll get a nice, smooth sweet ice tea every time.  You can add lemon, and maybe a touch of lime after you pour it into the glass.

Long Island Ice Tea is another story, for another time. 

Well this was a first I could have lived contentedly without ever knowing about…

No escape as mobile phone reaches Everest’s summit

A British man has set a world record by making the first mobile telephone call from the summit of Mount Everest, taking the blessing — or curse — of the cell phone to new heights.

"It’s cold, it’s fantastic, the Himalayas are everywhere," Rod Baber said in the phone call from the top of the 8,848-metre (29,198-foot) peak…

No Shit?  The Himalayas, did you say?  And…like…is there snow everywhere up there too?  Is it really high up there? 

See?  He’s on the fucking summit of Mount Everest, and you have to think that the thoughts in his head at that moment were actually some pretty profound ones.  That is a rare and dangerous adventure.  And he goes on that adventure…and he reaches the top.  He did it.  And the reward is a view of planet earth that few humans have ever seen with their own eyes.  But then he puts the goddamned cell phone to his face and all the comes out is shopping mall babble.  Cell phones just bring out the chattering little monkeys in all of us.  I’m not busting on them…I’d hate to live in a world without them.  But there will never be famous memorable words spoken into a cell phone.

Via SLOG…

Bolivians: Coca-Cola should drop ‘coca’

LA PAZ, Bolivia – Always Coca-Cola? Not if Bolivia’s coca growers have their way. The farmers want the word "Coca" dropped by the U.S. soft drink company, arguing that the potent shrub belongs to the cultural heritage of this Andean nation, where the coca leaf infuses everyday life and is sacred to many.

A commission of coca industry representatives advising an assembly rewriting Bolivia’s constitution passed a resolution Wednesday calling on the Atlanta, Ga.-based company to take "Coca" out of its name and asking the United Nations to decriminalize the leaf.

The resolution demands that "international companies that include in their commercial name the name of coca (example: Coca Cola) refrain from using the name of the sacred leaf in their products."

The commission, which met for three days in Sucre, 255 miles southeast of La Paz, is part of an effort led by President Evo Morales to rehabilitate the image of plant, used in the Andes for millennia but better known internationally as the base ingredient of cocaine.

Oh they’ll get right on it I’m sure…

Coca-Cola released a statement Thursday saying their trademark is "the most valuable and recognized brand in the world" and was protected under Bolivian law.

I can appreciate the sentiment.  I’d like it just fine thank you, if words on a product label actually meant things the way real words do.  But you have to realize that a product label isn’t there to tell you what the product actually Is.  Think of them as little mini advertisements that get put on cans and bottles and boxes of stuff.  They’re there to make you buy whatever they’ve been pasted onto, not to tell you what it is you’re buying.

But let me put it this way: if an American food and beverage corporation can feel perfectly fine putting the words ‘Country’ and ‘Time’ and ‘Lemonade’ in the name of an instant drink mix product that is mass produced in factories and in no way shape or form has, or ever did have, any actual lemonade in it, then let’s face it, we’re doing pretty darn good that we can say Coca-Cola has any Cola in it at all, let alone any Coca. 

Er…it does still have Cola in it…doesn’t it?  Some?  I don’t drink the stuff anymore myself…

Randomness from the comments at Fred Clark’s Slacktivist blog…

"But then the sailors knelt and prayed, not all together but five or six at a time. Side by side they knelt down together . . . but there only prayed at the same time men of different faiths so that no god should hear two men praying to him at once. As soon as any one should finish his prayer, another of the same faith would take his place . . ."

"And I too felt I should pray, yet I liked not to pray to a jealous god there where the frail affectionate gods whom the heathen love were being humbly invoked; so I bethought me, instead, of Sheol Nugganoth, whom the men of the jungle have long since deserted, who is now unworhsipped and alone; and to him I prayed."

"Idle Days on the Yann"
Lord Dunsany

The student asked the rabbi, "What is Hell like?"

"Hell," the rabbi says, "is just like Heaven. It is a glorious banquet table spread with the finest foods. But the people in Hell are starving because they have no elbows and they cannot feed themselves."

"I see," the student says, "but in Heaven the people do have elbows?"

"No," the rabbi says, "the people in Heaven don’t have elbows either. But in Heaven, they feed each other."

Fred has a delightfully snarky photograph to go along with this blog post, titled, The Lost Tomb.  It’s a tad hard to read the inscription, but the name is J. Cameron…